Tuesday, 22 August 2017

VMware to Hyper-V migration with Veeam

Problem

Okay, so here’s the problem. You want to migrate VMs from VMware vSphere 5 or 6 or whatever to Hyper-V 2016 but you can’t find a tool to use because you want near-zero downtime. You search around and find some options:

Sysinternals Disk2Vhd

Great tool and free! The problem is that you need a lot of downtime because it converts the entire disk and you cannot sync changes after the conversion is done so you need downtime from the time you start the conversion.

Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter

Another good tool but no longer supports the later versions of vSphere or Hyper-V. In fact, the tool itself is not supported as of June 3rd 2017. See more here. However, even if you do use it, you still cannot do the incremental sync that you need.

Third party tools to migrate VMware to Hyper-V

There’s some very useful tools that you can use but these come at a cost but will literally do near-zero downtime conversions. Have a look at Quest, Double-Take or PlateSpin.

Solution

So, I found a neat little workaround for this. Basically, use Veeam. Now, you need both Veeam Agent for Windows and Veeam Backup and Replication (and you can get free trials for both). The steps are below:

Install Veeam Agent for Windows on your VM

Install Veeam Backup and Replication on a backup server

Add your host into Veeam Backup and Replication

Create a backup repository in Veeam Backup and Replication

Back up your VM to a Veeam Repository on the backup server using Veeam Agent for Windows

Prevent users accessing the server to make changes

Do an incremental backup of your VM and shut it down

Use Veeam Backup and Replication to rescan the repository

Use Veeam Backup and Replication to do an Instant Restore of your VM onto a Hyper-V host and select to power on the VM

Re-enable user access

Use Veeam Backup and Replication to migrate the VM onto production storage (using the Instant Restore wizard)

The advantages of doing this are that you minimize downtime by doing incremental backups and then doing an instant restore. If you’re not familiar with this, Veeam Backup and Replication creates dummy VHD and VM configuration files on the Hyper-V storage which actually reference the backup server storage and the VM runs off the backup server storage. To improve performance, you may want to add faster disks and use 10Gb networking on your backup servers.
If you are a hosting provider then you really don’t want tenant VMs with access to the backup server so you can use the Veeam Cloud Connect Gateway (part of the Veeam Cloud Connect suite). This only requires a single port to be open from the tenant network - it’s generally used to back up VMs over the internet so it was designed with that security in mind.
I hope this helps people out as it looks like MS aren’t really providing a solution to do this just yet.